Last week marked the fifth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished" - the notorious speech in which George Bush landed on an aircraft carrier to announce that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. Amid the many ruminations on the date, here in the US, I realised I'd almost forgotten there's a war on. And I don't think I'm alone.

You'd be hard-pressed to see much of Iraq and Afghanistan on the news outlets here. They are devoting almost their entire schedules to fevered coverage of the Democratic primaries, where the emphasis has switched from the war to the tail-spinning economy. To be fair, in a ratings-driven universe, the election is the biggest, most remunerative soap opera around, a natural fund of inspiration and scandal - and thus the stuff of a news network president's dirtiest dreams. The war, by contrast, is depressing: a profound failure on every level, hard to look at squarely now because everybody wonders how it was we all went so crazy after 9/11. The networks have focus-tested the war for its ratings-worthiness, and found it wanting. It has been exiled to the corner of the screen.

It's not just the media that hides the war from us. We avert our eyes from it easily enough without aid or compulsion. The dismal receipts for nearly all the recent war-themed movies - In the Valley of Elah ($6.8m), Redacted ($.06m), Rendition ($9.7m), Lions for Lambs ($15m), Home of the Brave ($.04m), The Kingdom ($47m) - suggest the audience either is not ready for the war on screen yet, or is so far past the mealy-mouthed politics of most of the films that attending them seems like reading last year's news. The banality and preachiness of many of them - Elah, Lambs, I'm looking at you - probably didn't help. You can bet that the war-movie boomlet has ended, and that, as with Vietnam, the interesting war movies will arrive once the conflict is over.

But one has only to look at the biggest US box-office money-spinners of the past two weekends to realise that the state of the nation will inevitably leak out of even the most innocuous popular entertainments, acknowledging something real about the climate we live in.

Last week's megahit, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, proves it is now OK to call bullshit on paranoia, racism and xenophobia. Caught with a bomb-like bong on an international flight, our genial stoner heroes are judged to be a satanic alliance between Kim Jong-il and Osama bin Laden, and are hunted throughout by demented Homeland Security agents. They smoke out with Dubya ("You guys are awesomer!"), and re-encounter Neil Patrick Harris (namechecking his role in Starship Troopers, a film that is frighteningly prescient of the post-9/11 environment) en route to a blitzed-out, THC-heavy finale. As star Kal Penn - recently seen as an Islamist villain on 24 - told American TV presenter Keith Olberman this week: "Four years ago you couldn't even make jokes about this stuff." Now, the movie's eye-rolling contempt for what has happened to America is shared by four-fifths of the voting populace.

This weekend's monster hit, Iron Man, opens with the literalisation of blowback: decadent playboy-arms manufacturer Tony Starks, visiting Afghanistan, is hit by a bomb and spends the rest of the movie atoning, in sundry superheroic ways, for his earlier heedlessness. That's about as political as the movie gets, but it's a clear, unmistakable nod - without any preachiness - to the ugly zeitgeist.

So perhaps all those Iraq movies were a waste of time (certainly of my time). The real Iraq and post-9/11 movies are sci-fi outings by Americans (Frank Darabont's near-masterpiece The Mist, Mike Judge's Idiocracy) or non-Americans (28 Weeks Later, Children of Men). But, as disgust and disillusionment metastasise to unheard-of levels, there will be more megahits that address the war effectively, though indirectly, through satire or dystopian speculation. Because sooner or later - and it's usually later - the studios always catch up with the viewers.